Midnight Bites (40 page)

And the wedding day came, and the fear and pride and rush of something so big I couldn't even define it. Love, I guess. So much love.

Then the world turned, the sun came up, and . . . we were
married
. And that was weird, because it turned out getting married wasn't an achievement so much as a level-up, play-on kind of deal. Life was more different now than I'd ever imagined, because there was this other person entwined with me who was there
every day
. Not in the boyfriend/girlfriend I-can-leave-if-I-want way, but in an I'm-never-leaving-you way. Took time to figure out how to live with that, for both of us. We had amazing times and stupidly bad times and days where nothing happened at all, because . . . life. Life was happening together now, not separately. And it was only just beginning to dawn on me how incredibly wonderful that really was.

Every morning when I opened my eyes, I was still amazed she was lying in the same bed with me. But I didn't want to say any of that. Not to Myrnin, anyway.

“She seems happy,” Myrnin said. He was looking out the window as I drove, and he sounded quiet. Thoughtful. Not the usual thing for him. “I thought she would be more . . . restless.”

I guessed he was meaning to be nice and make small talk, but talking about Claire was creeping me out. I knew he'd had some kind of feelings for her—what they were exactly was a mystery, because he wasn't even as normal as most
vampires
, never mind regular human guys. When he said he loved Claire for her mind, I think he meant it, and from him, that was equally creepy.

“How's Jesse?” If we were talking about girls all of a sudden, it seemed only fair we should talk about his . . . though it was hard to figure out exactly what attraction crazy, wardrobe-challenged Myrnin had for hot, funny, savage Jesse, except they shared a liking for plasma.

“Lady Grey is . . . indescribable,” he said. “But then, she always was. She rescued me twice, you know, from a particularly awful kind of hell. And she was very kind to me in my recovery. I've missed her.”

“Uh-huh. And?”

“And what?”

“Seemed like the two of you had a thing.”

“A thing?”

“You know.”

“I do not know, and I might prefer not to know.”

“Let me put it another way: Do vampires . . . ?” I left it right there, filling in the blanks with raised eyebrows. He sent me an irritated look.

“Do we
what
? Your generation's infelicity with verbs fills me with despair.”

I didn't even know what
infelicity
was, but I guessed it meant we were bad at them. So I spelled it out. “Do vampires have sex?”

He seemed shocked. That was pretty funny, because I could swear he was about a thousand years old, and surely someone had mentioned sex to him before. If not,
holy crap
, this was going to be awkward.

“I . . .” He clearly had no idea what to say, and flapped his hands as if he was shooing the whole subject off. “That is far too personal a question, Shame, far too personal!”

“Yeah, the name's still Shane.”

“No, I believe I had it quite right this time. It suits the moment much better.”

It was pretty great, watching him squirm. “Are you actually a virgin? Because I don't think I've seen this much nervous fidgeting from anyone out of grade school.”

“I come from an age when what happened behind closed doors was kept there. And since you clearly will not abandon the subject,
vampires are fully capable of . . . such things. Just not as driven by them as humans, since we are not constantly hounded by the shadow of death. And we do not . . . procreate in the same way.”

That almost made sense, I guessed. “You skated by my other question. The virgin one.”

Myrnin gave me a frosty silence, so I guessed he wasn't going to answer . . . until he did. “I've had lovers,” he finally admitted. “Ada was my last. Since her . . . death, I've not been moved to attempt it again.”

I'd met Ada only in her last incarnation—a crazy, disembodied brain in a jar powering Myrnin's machine in his basement. I knew, because Claire had told me, that he'd killed the girl. Hadn't meant to, but she'd died, and his answer to that had been to try to make her live on as a brain in a jar. She hadn't cared much for it, and then she'd tried to kill us all. I guess in relationship terms, yeah, that kind of thing might put you off dating for a hundred years.

I know he regretted it. But that didn't change the fact that Claire had worked side by side with him for
years
, and every single day I'd wondered if he'd suddenly turn on her, too. And of course, he had, but Claire was ready for it. She was tough, my girl. My
wife
.

Wow. Still weird.

“So,” I said. “Changing the subject . . .”

“Thank you.”

“. . . what exactly is that thing you pulled out of the grave, anyway?”

“A kind of camera obscura. Oh, but I suppose they teach you nothing in school these days. . . . That is the earliest type of camera, invented in perhaps the sixth century. This one has been enhanced with certain properties that make it project something else.”

“What?”

“Darkness,” Myrnin said. “Or, more accurately, the complete
absence of light. It can create an area of darkness in which things that prefer darkness can be studied.”

“Yeah, that doesn't sound creepy at all.”

“Humans have an irrational dislike of darkness. Really, there's nothing in it that isn't also there in the light.”

“I like to be able to see what's biting me, thanks.”

“Does that really help?” Myrnin sounded honestly interested. “It's all well and good
knowing
, but
stopping it
, ah, that's the real challenge. Things that bite are rarely easily discouraged.”

He ought to know, I guessed. “What exactly is it you're researching?”

His tone turned cautious, all of a sudden. “I can't say, really.”

I made the last turn down a dark cul-de-sac. His lab was off to the right, at about two o'clock on the circle, next to the imposing loom of the newly refurbished Day House. Gramma Day was still up, or she'd left some lights burning. The alleyway that led to Myrnin's lab entrance was still dark. Of course.

“Can't say why?”

“I believe I'm paying you not to ask.”

He was. I parked the car, killed the lights, and grabbed his arm as he popped the passenger door open. “Hey,” I said, and he turned to look at me. There were red glints in his dark eyes, like sparks coming off a fire. “Tell me you're not cooking up something dangerous.”

“Now, why would you think something like that?” Myrnin effortlessly broke my grip and got out and dashed like the spider he was down the dark alley.

Me, I locked the car doors behind me, got out my flashlight, and followed at the pace of just another human.

An armed and dangerous one, at least.

•   •   •

Claire had equipped Myrnin's lab with motion-activated lights, mostly for her own benefit because Myrnin, damn him, could see just fine in the dark. The rising glow helped me not to break my neck on the steps leading down into the main room, because he'd spilled something all over the stone again. Sticky or slick, no way was I going to step in it. No telling what it was, but it looked biological.

Myrnin was already at one of the lab tables, which had been cleared of its usual litter of crazy stuff . . . cleared because he'd just shoved it off on the floor, of course. Claire had tried to educate him about trip hazards and keeping the place cleaned, but he just couldn't get there, and she'd finally given up and resigned herself to picking up after him. I left the stuff on the floor. Wasn't being paid to clean.

“So explain it to me. Why am I here exactly?” I asked him, as he fitted on a pair of weird-looking goggles. He flipped a switch on the side, and they were bathed in an eerie blue glow inside. The glass magnified his eyes.

“You're here to protect me, of course,” he said.

“From what?”

“Ah, that's the question, isn't it?
From what.
”

This wasn't sounding too great. “Can't help you if you're not more, you know, specific.”

“You're here to protect me from getting lost,” he said, as he hooked up the cemetery camera to something that looked like a vacuum hose straight off a Hoover. It didn't quite fit. He duct-taped it together with way too much tape, and then jammed the other end into another box. . . . This one was polished wood, decorated with ornate little gold letters applied in neat rows all over it.

“Wait, getting lost?” I said, as he worked. “Are we going somewhere?”

“We are,” he said. “Come here.” I put the flashlight down on the table and came around to join him. He pushed a button on the
wooden box, and grabbed my hand to slam it down on top of the switch as he slipped his own hand away. “Now, don't let go of it,” he said. “Not until I tell you. And no matter what you see, stay still.”

“I don't—”

My voice choked off, because darkness crashed in with the thick weight of midnight, and there was
nothing
. My mouth dried up; I flinched and almost pulled my hand back but managed to hang on. Myrnin gripped my arm and held tight.

“You'll see things,” his disembodied voice whispered. “Bad things. But they won't harm you. But one thing is
very
important: Don't let me stay here. You can't let me stay, no matter how much I want to do it. Don't let go of the button until I tell you, and when you do, you have to be touching me. Understand?”

I couldn't
see
a damn thing, and almost said so, and then something moved at the corner of my vision. Not like a light, exactly—more like a disturbance of the darkness. I turned my head that direction, and saw a very small wisp of gray that moved, got brighter, and took on form.

A ghost, at first. A woman, from the form, wearing an old-fashioned long, full skirt like something from a documentary on Victorians. She took on more color, though she stayed pale in skin. The dress was dark red, like drying blood, and it had a high collar and long sleeves. She had her dark, glossy hair up in a complicated bun thing.

It took me a second, but then I realized who she was. Ada. Myrnin's former lab assistant, a vampire who'd gotten on his bad side and ended up as a brain in a jar. I'd only known her as a crazycakes hologram thing, but she looked real enough here, as she glided up toward us.

Myrnin took on form and color, too, but not the Myrnin who was holding on to my arm. That one never let go, never moved. The one
walking toward her was the
old
Myrnin . . . and he was dressed out of the same period closet as Ada was, with some kind of fancy tight black trousers and high boots and a white shirt with lace under a long black coat. The only color on him was a bright bloodred ruby he wore as a pin on the front of his shirt.

That old-school Myrnin lunged at her, slammed her into the invisible wall behind her, and as she screamed, he bit at her throat. Tore it open.

Drank.

“No,” Modern-Day Myrnin whispered. He sounded shaky. Horrified. “
No. No
, this is not what I want. Not what I need. Stop.
Stop.
”

The Myrnin acting out Ada's murder in front of us never paused. She was dying, and it was pretty horrible. I looked away and swallowed hard. I've never been good with just bystanding.

Myrnin—the one next to me—took in a deep breath and let it out, slowly. The scene vanished, just melted on the air as if it had never been there. His voice, when it came, was hesitant. “It is an inexact science, and that . . . nightmare is rarely far from my mind. Bide a moment.”

I guessed that was another word for
wait
, and I did, as more shadows moved and whispered and crowded, all unseen in the dark. Some talked. One or two screamed, and I flinched. I could almost feel them brushing over me, like damp breezes. It felt sickening.

“There,” Myrnin whispered. He sounded different. More focused. “
There
it is.”

This time, a storm of gray appeared, swirling like clouds, and then parted to show a confusion of bodies, men, dressed in those same period clothes, all wrestling and shouting, though I could hear it only in a muffled kind of way. It looked like they were clustered in around something.

Someone screamed. A woman. High and thin and terrified. In
pain. Myrnin's hand closed hard on my arm, hard enough to bruise, but I didn't mind. It felt like I was falling into that crowd, or that it was rushing up on us, and suddenly I was standing surrounded by all those guys yelling and striking out, and in the center was a woman crouched on the ground, screaming as clubs came down on her. She was bloody and one of her arms was broken, but she still kept putting it up to try to protect her head.

I wanted to let go of that button and help her. I didn't know who she was. Didn't matter. Bunch of bullies beating somebody—my natural impulse was to jump in.

And then I realized she was
protecting
someone who was lying on the ground senseless underneath her. A man in dirty rags, curled into a shaking ball, bleeding in the street.

The woman raised her head, and I saw her flame red hair slipping free of pins, and her eyes caught fire and she snarled, showing fangs, and leaped for the man whose club was coming down toward her. She snapped his neck, picked up his club, and effectively beheaded a couple of guys with it.

I knew who that was.

Jesse. Lady Grey.
Myrnin's current girlfriend, if that was the right word for two vampires who were kind of hooked up, or not. But this must have been a couple of hundred years ago, and the man lying on the street, trying to get up and slipping in his own blood . . . that was Myrnin. A crazier version than the one I knew. He looked pretty terrible.